Ken Dryden: The Man Who Can Save Hockey as the New Commissioner of the NHL

A Man for All Seasons: Ken Dryden, Next NHL Commissioner? He has my vote....

With all the rhetoric available right now being spewed by both the NHL and NHLPA over their labour dispute (Billionaires who are making money, trying to squeeze more money out of the millionaire players that they feel they themselves overpay) I think its time to finally rid the league of its money grubbing head honcho and put into place a new Commissioner who has the good of the game at his very core. That is not Gary Bettman. That man is former player, Member of Canadian Parliament, writer and deep intellectual thinker, Ken Dryden.

I will give Bettman one positive in his almost 20 years running the league; The 30 teams in the NHL are on much sounder financial footing in general then they were 20 years ago. All 7 Canadian Teams (there were 8 Canadian teams when he started) are solid financially. Between them, they bring in nearly 41% of the total league wide revenue. This despite the fact that less than a quarter of the teams in the league are Canadian based (23.3%).

I will give Bettman credit for the fact that once he saw the public backlash his league was getting when, under his leadership, Quebec City and Winnipeg both lost teams to US Cities (Colorado and Phoenix), the league stepped up and created an equalization formula to help Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Ottawa fight to stay alive. This was at a time 16 years ago when the Canadian dollar had sunk to $0.63 when compared to the US dollar making it next to impossible for those teams to compete. When you are taking in dollars in Canadian and paying your salaries to your players in American, you need to take in nearly $1.50 Canadian to pay out $1.00 US. In other words, he saved the remaining 6 Canadian teams in the late 1990’s not situated in Toronto or Montreal through the creation of this program.

 Bettman will have caused 3 work stoppages in his time in charge of the NHL

I sincerely doubt Dryden would have had any had he been Commish in the same time period...

But as the Canadian dollar grew in strength and each of the then 6 Canadian teams grew stronger, it became clear that there were other monetary issues that needed to be resolved in the league. Nashville, Florida, Tampa Bay, Buffalo, Ottawa and Pittsburgh all were either on the brink of bankruptcy or were sold out of bankruptcy court because their previous owners had lost boatloads of money. The same happened in Phoenix and Atlanta with the Thrashers pulling up stakes and heading back to Canada, becoming the 2^nd coming of the Winnipeg Jets last year.  Phoenix is STILL trying to sort their ownership mess out some 3 years after nearly being bought by former RIM CEO Jim Balsillie and moved to the GTA.

Of the 7 teams I just mentioned, 5 of them either didn’t exist before Bettman took office or were moved to their Southern US cities under his watch. Buffalo and Pittsburgh had the unfortunate coincidence of being owned by people who were criminals as both teams had their owners or members of their ownership groups indicted by the authorities.

The commonality amongst the other teams I mentioned is that all of them lost a ton of money (or, as is the case for Phoenix, still losing money) because of the market they are situated in. Non-traditional markets for Hockey (the US South) tend to have a short attention span for the sport. With college football dominating the sporting landscape, unless you are a winning team, they hardly pay attention to you and even then, hockey is barely a blip on the local sporting scene.

 The rise of the Canadian Dollar has REALLY helped Canadian Sports Franchises

Only recently has Nashville solidified their ownership structure by getting local owners to help keep the team there. This despite the fact that the Predators (still the worst sports nickname in professional sports) have been a good team almost since their inception. Tampa Bay as well has seen steady crowd support mostly due to the fact they too, like Carolina, have won the Cup (2004 when they won in 7 games, beating the Calgary Flames) and they have been to at least 1 other Semi-Final in the last 10 years, losing to the Boston Bruins only 2 years ago.  

Another non-traditional market, Carolina, has been mostly able to survive because they have had very good teams in the last 10 years. Since 2002, Carolina has been to the Stanley Cup Final twice, won the Cup in 2006 (Beating the Edmonton Oilers in 7 games) and they have been to the Conference final another time losing to Pittsburgh in a sweep.

Despite the fact that league revenue has grown in his tenure, labour issues will continue to be the biggest hurdle that this Commissioner continues to trip over. In 1994, half the season was wiped out because of a strike. When the season did finally begin (a short 48 game schedule), we witnessed the beginning of the “Dead Puck” era as defensive, clutching and grabbing hockey ruled the sport for the next 10 years. What changed that? Another Labour issue of course. The cancellation of the entire 2004-05 season was brutal but the one thing that it produced was a severe crackdown on obstruction and a few other rules that were suddenly being called again that seemed to have been forgotten. It should not have taken the loss of an entire season to get these rule changes in place so despite the good it brought, the bad (loss of the season) far outweighs it.

Here we are again, 7 years after a lockout wiped out the 2004-05 season facing another possible work stoppage in the NHL. When it happened in 2004, there were some legitimate reasons (caused by the owners themselves mind you, but still). Salaries were skyrocketing, teams with lower revenue were struggling to compete, Small-market teams could not afford to keep their best players. All of these are legitimate reasons for what happened in 2004. All of these reasons led to a hard salary cap that helped out every team remain competitive (except for the Leafs apparently, who haven’t made the playoffs since the 2004 season (pre-hard cap).

It is now 2012 and the NHL has seen their hard salary cap floor and ceiling rise significantly (since it is tied directly to Hockey Related Revenue or HRR as it is referred to) to the point where the upper limit of the original salary cap in 2005 is now considered the floor of what would be the 2012 salary cap range. Bettman helped make this happen, of that there is no doubt. He and the league broke the union to the point that since 2004, there have been 4 men in charge of it; Bob Goodenow, Ted Saskin, Paul Kelly and now Donald Fehr. The issues that were once at the heart of all the Labour situation are no longer the ones that are at the crux of the matter today.

In the last 8 years, each of these men has been the head of the NHLPA

When once the central problem was escalating salaries, the issue now isn’t trying to control salary spending as spending on salaries is directly connected to the growth of the business now and the players received 57% of HRR in each of the last 7 seasons. Sure, there were some teams that spent right to the limit (Philly, Detroit and Chicago come to mind right away) and others that barely got to the floor every year (Florida and the Islanders) but overall, if the league is bringing in $3 billion a year, and every team now has a fixed amount in salaries each season that they need to spend/can spend, then the problem is no longer about a broken league not being able to make any money.  The issue now is to help the owners make MORE money by taking it away from the men who make earn it for them with their performances.  

Monetary issues have been so important to the league that over the last 2 or 3 years, we have seen a sharp decline in the actual on ice product. Player safety has also come to the forefront (as was expected once they brought in the stupid instigator rule) as the respect players have for one another has taken a nose dive over the years. Concussions of all kinds have risen steadily as more has become known of the significance of head injuries and their effects on players right after their injuries, their cumulative effects during a players career and the effects that they have on players after they retire.

All of these issues need to be addressed on a League basis and yet they simply haven’t been and continue to be a back burner issue as the League and players continue to fight over our money. Even something moronically obvious as grandfathering in the visor rule for all new players coming into the league (something so incredibly obvious to everyone else outside the sport, including people like me who play ball hockey recreationally and has a visor) is something that gets pushed aside by everyone involved in the collective bargaining process.

For all of the money issues, clearly the owners love Gary Bettman and the way he has turned some of them from millionaires into billionaires. It’s the ones that he turned from billionaires into millionaires that have been pushing for more and more concessions from the players to help re-line their pockets with some of the money they have lost trying to follow Bettman’s Southern US expansion blueprint. Despite its’ failure (overall), Bettman has survived mostly because of how he turned the league around financially. The game and it’s players are clearly not at the core of his role as Commissioner and that needs to change.

 I may be a bit of a stretch but with the Instigator rule we have seen a loss of respect 

among NHL players and a rise in serious head injuries....hmmmm

One of the few men who has continued to be an advocate for player safety and had the good of the game always as his central mantra whenever he is asked about the state of hockey, is former Montreal Canadiens Goaltending great, and former President of the Toronto Maple Leafs Ken Dryden. Here is a man who is in the Hockey Hall of Fame, won everything you could possibly win as a player, retired early (at the age of 31) to pursue other interests in his life (he basically got bored with the game as he helped the Habs win 4 straight Stanley Cup Championships in the mid to late 1970’s and 6 Cups overall in only 7 full NHL Seasons), became a Liberal Member of Parliament until 2004 and written several books on life and on the sport of hockey. He is a deep thinker who knows the ins and outs of the sport from his first hand knowledge being on the ice and in the boardroom. He is also a trained lawyer who is able to navigate his way around both athletes and owners in the sport with relative ease.

 Once this current labour situation is resolved, I believe it is time to replace Bettman with Dryden and start to focus on growing the game, changing the focus from US growth to growing the game in areas where you can make every team more money: Canada. As it stands now, there are 7 Canadian based teams with the latest being the admitted failure in Atlanta (for a 2^nd time) forcing that franchise to move to Winnipeg one year ago. Here is the actual list; Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. All of these teams are all financially sound and have benefited significantly from the surge in the Canadian dollar. 

With the problems in Phoenix still unresolved and the people of both Markham, Ontario and Quebec City building NHL sized arenas, as well as the fact that Hamilton still has Copps Coliseum available and a billionaire still hovering around, willing to revamp Coops and dying to own an NHL team (Jim Balsillie, whom I believe is still a billionaire despite the way RIM and RIM shares have been ravaged by the stock market), the time is right to move a financially floundering teams (like Phoenix, possibly Florida and Columbus as well) and possibly expand into both Markham and Hamilton, giving the League 10 Canadian teams.

 With Bettman out as Commish, Balsillie would possibly finally be allowed into the 

"Club" of NHL owners, if he still has enough cash, then again, that isn't always a priority in the NHL

One of the proponents of more Canadian NHL franchises is Ken Dryden. He has consistently espoused the virtues of adding more money making teams in Canada, even if it is simply to offset the money losing teams in the US. Remember that he used to be the President of the Toronto Maple Leafs for several years and, despite that fact, and the current regimes’ constant attack of any suggestion of a 2^nd franchise within their “territory” being a violation that they could not survive and would fight vehemently, Dryden is among the first to tell you that not only could a 2^nd team survive but it would be extremely successful to the point where as many as 2 new teams could thrive alongside Toronto in this market.

Dryden over the last few years has been an advocate for more action on the part of the league with regards to the concussion issue. He has always been on side with adding more Canadian based teams going so far as to use the analogy of a franchised business model of a Restaurant Franchise in comparison to the NHL and its problem franchises. If a Restaurant is failing in a certain market, usually they close up shop and move to another location in the hopes of better revenue generation. In the NHL, you have a couple of teams struggling at the gate (Phoenix, Florida, Columbus lately), losing tons of money. Why not move them to a market where it is a guarantee that they will make money instead of lose it? Why not move them to a market that has a deep rooted passion for the sport like the Greater Toronto Area, or Hamilton or even Quebec City?

 This map already has the Coyotes playing in Quebec City, 

where they most likely should and will end up

The argument is that if 7 Canadian NHL teams can generate 41% of the league wide $3 Billion generated that equates to $1.23 Billion from 7 teams. When you drill that number down further, that means each team represents total revenue to the league of roughly $176 million. Adding 3 more teams to the League in Quebec City, Hamilton and Toronto would push the total revenue from $1.23 up to 1.76 Billion, or an increase of $500 million from just 3 teams (that were previously a drain on the league, costing them money) based upon the numbers from the season that just ended, that is a significant increase.   

Mr. Dryden sees the financial and cultural value of adding teams to Canada for the league not only from a league perspective but also from the impact it would have on the psyche of Canadians. He wrote an article for Grantland.com posted on December 14^th, 2011, which explains that Hockey is much more than a sport to Canadians. He explains it like this;

                “If Canadian NHL teams aren't doing well — on the ice or off — the hundreds of thousands of kids and adults who play recreationally don't seem to be doing as well. And because hockey seems to be a metaphor we as Canadians have applied to ourselves, and others have applied to us, when hockey isn't going well, we don't seem to be doing as well, either.”

 

 This is a man who once was in consideration for the Liberal Leadership in 2006

Why couldn't he lead the NHL as Commissioner?

 He goes on to explain that having that kind of an impact on a culture is something that no other league Commissioner has as part of his duties, only the NHL Commissioner has that worry. To me, the fact that he is the only person to even acknowledge this fact shows me that Mr. Dryden is clearly the one man out there that would easily fill the shoes of Bettman.

In fact, I would suggest that given his credentials and his pedigree, Dryden would not only do the job that Bettman has done, he would be more conciliatory, more open to innovation, more willing to have an ongoing dialogue with the players in order to avert labour stoppages. He would have the forethought to use the NHL shield in a much more positive manner with inner city youth, with natives in the Nunavut Territory.

Mr. Dryden is a man for all seasons. He is a former star athlete, lawyer and author who has been the President of the most financially successful and most scrutinized franchise in the NHL (by its’ own fans and those of other teams alike). He has been a politician (so he knows how to compromise for the greater good) and he has a deep rooted passion for the sport which he once dominated as seen by his countless books and continued presence in and around the sport. In short, if there is a better candidate to replace Gary Bettman, I sure would like to see their resume because it is doubtful they will have accomplished or be nearly as qualified as Mr. Dryden.